An artist's sketch shows Quebec Superior Court Justice Guy Cournoyer instructing the jury at the murder trial for Luka Rocco Magnotta, Monday, Dec. 15, 2014 in Montreal. Magnotta is charged in connection with the death and dismemberment of university student Lin Jun in a case that made international headlines. Photo: THE CANADIAN PRESS/Mike McLaughlin I burst into tears at the news — the what-were-they-doing-in-there, needlepointing-the-verdict-on-tiny-pillows-news? — that on the eighth day, a Quebec Superior Court jury found Luka Magnotta guilty of first-degree murder and four other charges.
The tears were of relief, nothing else — relief that the jurors had made their way to the truth of Magnotta, that psychiatric jargon didn’t defeat common sense and that we can all now bid farewell to the awful narcissist who killed the gentle Chinese student Lin Jun for no reason other than it kept his own name in the klieg lights of modern celebrity.
As Lin’s father, Lin Diran, put it, his son was drawn to Canada, to Montreal, and after being here for 12 weeks, standing vigil over the trial, the father now understands all that will never be Lin Jun’s — from the wide-open spaces and fresh air to the chance to live as a free gay man, perhaps to walk down the street holding hands with a man he loved.
Lin Jun had such a man once, Lin Feng. They had broken up and Feng was out of the country by the time Jun was killed, but the two remained close friends.
Lin Jun’s parents didn’t know he was gay, but once, when they were still a couple, Lin Jun introduced them to Feng — as a friend only, but he was so bursting proud of Feng he simply had to have them meet.
Such quiet joy in another was the very antithesis of Magnotta, who was driven by a relentless need for attention.
It’s why he was a prostitute and for a time an actor in gay porn; why he pretended to be “dating” Karla Homolka; why he killed and posted online three videos of kittens dying; why he staged shots so as to invite the greatest revulsion and, the world being what it is, the widest viewership.
It’s probably even why he suddenly appeared, in the late spring of 2012, with a puppy, showing up to see a client with the little dog in tow.
It was May 14.
By then, Magnotta was busy building online buzz for 1 Lunatic 1 Ice Pick (the video of Lin’s dismemberment), and actively planning what would be in the video.
Four days later, on May 18-19, he filmed himself hovering with a small electric saw over the body of another young man, never located; this Magnotta used as the opening scene of 1 Lunatic 1 Ice Pick.
Six days later, on May 25, Magnotta killed Lin, shot the dismemberment, at one point placing the puppy at Lin’s torso.
Then, its purpose having been served, Magnotta killed the dog, and threw it in the garbage, just as he did Lin.
Lin Jun (pictured). in a file photo.
The planet existed to serve him. People and animals were props to his reflection. Attention was his oxygen, his food, even his aphrodisiac.
Is Magnotta normal? Of course not. He’s a freak. That doesn’t equate to craziness, in the legal sense or any other.
The best bet is that he has a personality disorder — narcissistic, histrionic, borderline or some fun mix of the three.
These are among the hardest of mental disorders in the world to treat because they aren’t illnesses in the sense that illness imposes itself upon a healthy mind, but are rather hard-wired into the personality. You are your personality, or, in Magnotta’s case, his personality disorder. The chances of mitigating it are grim.
His claim to suffering schizophrenia — it was a rushed if not careless diagnosis but was thereafter rubber-stamped — simply didn’t square with his conduct.
Rocco Luka Magnotta.
Two forensic psychiatrists testified for the defence that one can be even floridly psychotic and still appear normal, but the jurors saw Magnotta over the course of almost a month on the crystal-clear surveillance video that is such a feature of modern life.
They saw him a week before the killing enter his Montreal apartment building with that still-unidentified young man. They saw the product of that night too, the young man asleep or drugged on Magnotta’s bed, naked and bound at the ankles, Magnotta over him, saw in hand.
The following week, they saw Lin Jun and Magnotta enter the building, and by 2:06 on the morning of May 25, they saw Magnotta wearing Lin’s distinctive Keith Haring T-shirt and ball cap, making the first of 16 trips to the garbage room.
They saw Magnotta mailing off Lin’s severed hands and feet — even demanding his money back when he bought boxes that were too small — grabbing a cab to the airport, walking through it, landing in Paris, checking in at a hotel, waiting for a bus to Berlin.
All of it was on video, and throughout, Magnotta was self-possessed.
For a fellow who claimed to have killed Lin because he feared he was a “government agent,” he cast not one glance over his shoulder. He was not deluded. He carried on ordinary conversations with cab drivers, hotel clerks and the man he hooked up with in Berlin. He set up new online ads on gay hookup sites.
If his were the face of schizophrenia, those with it would be running the world, and they aren’t: It’s a terrible mental illness, one of the most serious. Magnotta’s father, who testified at the trial, genuinely suffers from it; with the big drugs he takes, he barely manages.
Magnotta used his father’s illness, as he used everything else. He went to school on it, as they say in golf, and picked up the language, verbal and body, of schizophrenia.
He was never tested for malingering.
The tests, designed to ferret out those who exaggerate or fake the symptoms of mental illness, particularly those for whom the gain may be huge, aren’t perfect, but some have proven reliable — the Structured Interview of Reported Symptoms (SIRS), the Miller Forensic Assessment of Symptoms Test or M-FAST.
And Magnotta refused to be assessed by prosecution psychiatrist Dr. Gilles Chamberland — or anyone else working for the prosecution.
He was hiding something, and he was hiding it in plain sight, if only one could get past the fog of psycho-babble. Chamberland saw him clearly. So did prosecutor Louis Bouthillier. And they helped 12 ordinary Montrealers see him too, and they deserve the thanks of a grateful, relieved and safer nation.
cblatchford@postmedia.com
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